Most furniture items are built of assembled parts that are securely fastened together by suitable means; the assembled parts form the frame of the furniture item. Typically, the furniture frame is upholstered, i.e., provided with cushioning springs and covered with padding and fabric. Staples or other fasteners are then driven through the fabric and underlying padding into the frame of the item to thereby improve the appearance of the item while making it more comfortable to the user.
As is well known, springs, padding and fabric often wear out while the underlying furniture frame remains intact. Accordingly, in those situations, the staples or other fasteners are extracted from the frame so that the old springs, padding and fabric may be replaced as needed.
Where the frame is made from a very hard wood, extraction of the fastening means can be a difficult process. A number of inventors have developed hand tools having utility in the extraction of staples, tacks and nails, but such tools have failed at least to some extent in addressing the needs of the upholstery trade.
For example, upholsterers have known for years that the most widely used tool in the industry has significant limitations. However, no one other than the present inventor has been able to create a better tool because the prior art, when considered as a whole, neither teaches nor suggests how the art of extractors could be significantly advanced.
The popular tool mentioned above is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,310,288 to Berry. Although the commercial success of that tool has proven its utility, a brief look at its structure and the structure of the common staple will reveal the need for further development in this field of technology.
The common staple includes a pair of parallel, transversely spaced apart leg members that depend to opposite ends of an interconnecting means, known as the crown of the staple, in orthogonal relation thereto; the legs and crown are formed integrally with one another. Persons unskilled in the art of staple extraction will usually attempt the extraction with a tool such as a flat head screwdriver. However, the crown of a staple has an extent greater than the width of a typical screwdriver head; accordingly, as the individual attempts to pry the staple out of the frame, the crown of the staple will always buckle near its center and many times it will break. The individual then has to use pliers to pull the leg members out of the frame, one at a time.
Although such a crude method of staple extraction will eventually result in a removed staple, the limitations of such procedure are numerous. To mention a few, such extraction procedure, being inefficient, takes too much time to be considered as a viable option by a busy professional upholsteror, enlarges the holes where the staple legs had been and thus ruins such locations for future use, and can damage the underlying padding which is undesireable in those situations where only the fabric cover needs to be replaced.
The method employed in using the Berry tool mentioned earlier is an improvement over the screwdriver and pliers method, but staple crowns still buckle and break even when the Berry tool is used. This is because the Berry tool grasps the staple in the center of the crown, as depicted in FIG. 2 of the Berry patent, thereby causing buckling.
Other fastener-extracting tools that have been developed over the years but which have met with less commercial success are shown in Poskin U.S. Pat. No. 3,698,689, Grill et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,049,236, Ranck, Sr. U.S. Pat. No. 775, 856, Emery U.S. Pat. No. 2,563,227, Olsen U.S. Pat. No. 664,494, Truman U.S. Pat. No. 450,922, Crofoot U.S. Pat. No. 1,973,846, Beahr U.S. Pat. No. 864,223, Baldwin et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 1,294,600, Cantales U.S. Pat. No. 3,774,252, Cochran U.S. Pat. No. 910,173, De Genova U.S. Pat. No. 2,915,927 Shelton U.S. Pat. No. 2,678,189, Cavanagh U.S. Pat. No. 1,956,166, Settles U.S. Pat. No. 1,949,335 and Seward U.S. Pat. No. 2,212,080.